Real0ne
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Sorry but in your previous post you are confusing Humes work with kants, (I looked it up), in that kants work does not 'stop' there.
That said, in your defense, kants discourse on the narrowly argued 'PURE' reason he is forced to agree with Hume on certain elements, as you pointed out, of humes arguments, so though he said it in argument it was only preliminary, a sort of preview forming the building blocks to later arguments added in support of the necessary and larger boundaries and scope of functional human reason which you would see further details in his discourse on "PRACTICAL' reason and his critique on 'RELIGION' (and several more) demonstrating the requirements of an integrated 'system' to properly answer the question. That said we cant approach this by analysing a carburator with the idea it properly describes the whole car or its purpose or how it serves or must serve us.
That said I pulled several excerpts from several sources quoting kant that you may find intriguing. When I was young, about 100 years ago I picked up his discourse on 'pure' reason and was not able to put it down. That was the beginning of mega hours of reading for me.
Normally I refrain from posting walls of text but this has many facets that must be examined to even scrape the surface so enjoy:
The influence of Augustine in the subsequent history of ethics resulted from the fact that it was his synthesis of Christianity (the official religion of the Roman Empire after 325) and Greek philosophy that survived the destruction of the Western Roman Empire, especially in the monasteries where the texts were still read. Boethius (c. 480–524) gave us the definition of the concept of ‘person’ that has been fundamental to ethical theory. To understand this, we need to go back into the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. The church had to explain how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit could be distinct and yet not three different gods. They used, in Latin, the term persona, which means ‘role’ but which was also used by the grammarians to distinguish what we call ‘first person, second person and third person’ pronouns and verb-forms. The same human being can be first person ‘I’, second person ‘you’, and third person ‘he’ or ‘she’, depending on the relations in which he or she stands. The doctrine of the Trinity comes to be understood in terms of three persons, one God, with the persons standing in different relations to each other. But then this term ‘person’ is also used to understand the relation of the second person's divinity to his humanity. The church came to talk about one person with two natures, the person standing under the natures. This had the merit of not making either the humanity or the divinity less essential to who Jesus was. Plato and Aristotle did not have any term that we can translate ‘person’ in the modern sense, as someone (as opposed to something) that stands under all his or her attributes. Boethius, however, defines ‘person’ as ‘individual substance of rational nature,’ a key step in the introduction of our present concept.
The reentry of Aristotle into Europe caused a rebirth (a ‘renaissance’), but it also gave rise to a crisis, because it threatened to undermine the harmony established from the time of Augustine between the authority of reason, as represented by Greek philosophy, and the authority of faith, as represented by the doctrines of the Christian church. There were especially three ‘errors of Aristotle’ that seemed threatening: his teaching that the world was eternal, his apparent denial of personal immortality, and his denial of God's active agency in the world. (See, for example, Bonaventure, In Hexaemeron, VI.5 and In II Sent., lib. II, d.1, pars 1, a.1, q.2.) These three issues (‘the world, the soul, and God’) become in one form or another the focus of philosophical thought for the next six centuries.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) undertook the project of synthesis between Aristotle and Christianity, though his version of Christianity was already deeply influenced by Augustine, and so by Neo-Platonism. Aquinas, like Aristotle, emphasized the ends (vegetative, animal and typically human) given to humans in the natural order. He described both the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, but he did not feel the tension that current virtue ethicists sometimes feel between virtue and the following of rules or principles. The rules governing how we ought to live are known, some of them by revelation, some of them by ordinary natural experience and rational reflection. But Aquinas thought these rules consistent in the determination of our good, since God only requires us to do what is consistent with our own good. Aquinas's theory is eudaimonist; ‘And so the will naturally tends towards its own last end, for every man naturally wills beatitude. And from this natural willing are caused all other willings, since whatever a man wills, he wills on account of the end.’ (Summa Theologiae I, q.60. a.2) God's will is not exercised by arbitrary fiat; but what is good for some human being can be understood as fitting for this kind of agent, in relation to the purpose this agent intends to accomplish, in the real environment of the action, including other persons individually and collectively. The principles of natural moral law are the universal judgments made by right reasoning about the kinds of actions that are morally appropriate and inappropriate for human agents. They are thus, at least in principle and at a highly general level, deducible from human nature. Aquinas held that reason, in knowing these principles, is participating in the eternal law, which is in the mind of God (Summa Theologiae I, q.91. a.2).
Everything in the universe is necessary, and there is no free will, except in as far as Spinoza is in favor of calling someone free who is led by reason (Ethics, I, prop. 32). Each human mind is a limited aspect of the divine intellect. On this view (which has its antecedent in Stoicism) the human task is to move towards the greatest possible rational control of human life. Leibniz was, like Descartes, not primarily an ethicist. He said, however, that ‘the highest perfection of any thinking being lies in careful and constant pursuit of true happiness’ (New Essays on Human Understanding, XXI, 51). The rationalists were not denying the centrality of God in human moral life, but their emphasis was on the access we have through the light of reason rather than through sacred text or ecclesiastical authority.
He [Kant] then adds a bold idea, which breaks with his own previous orthodox theological concept of a transcendent God. Developing his old notion of God as “an ideal of human reason,” he identifies God with our concept of moral duty rather than as an independent substance. This notion of an immanent God (that is, one internal to our world rather than transcendently separate from it), while not carefully worked out by Kant himself, would be developed by later German Idealists (most significantly, Hegel). While conceding that we think of God as an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent personal Being, Kant now denies that personality can be legitimately attributed to God—again stepping out of mainstream Judeo-Christian doctrine. Also, rather than still postulating God as an independent reality, he here says that “God and the world are correlates,” interdependent and mutually implicating one another.
Kant goes on to condemn Spinoza’s panentheistic conception of God (that is, the view also found in Hegel, that God contains our world rather than transcending it) as outlandish “enthusiastic” fanaticism. In fact, he suggests the inverse—instead of holding that we are in God, Kant now indicates that God is in us, though different from us, in that God's reality is ideal rather than substantial. He proceeds to maintain that not only God is infinite, but so are the world and rational freedom, identifying God with “the inner vital spirit of man in the world.” Kant makes one final controversial claim when he denies that a concept of God is even essential to religion (Opus, pp. 200-204, 210-211, 213-214, 225, 229, 231, 234-236, 239-240, and 248).
Kant also argues that the morality of an action is a function of the internal forces that motivate one to act, rather than of the external (physical) actions or their consequences.
Thus metaphysics for Kant concerns a priori knowledge, or knowledge whose justification does not depend on experience; and he associates a priori knowledge with reason. The project of the Critique is to examine whether, how, and to what extent human reason is capable of a priori knowledge.
In spite of what he may have perceived as weaknesses in some of the "classic" proofs, he remained a strong believer in God throughout his life.
"But if we ask who has so firmly established the laws of nature and who has limited its operations, then we will come to God as the supreme cause of the entirety of reason and nature." (Kant, 25)
"The world depends on a supreme being, but the things in the world all mutually depend on one another. Taken together they constitute a complete whole." (Kant, 1978, 22)
From the very beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason Kant insists on the limits of human knowledge: our knowledge cannot reach beyond human experience and our experience is confined to the natural world. The deficiency is not easily remediable, since it arises from the limits and failings of human reason, which “is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” (CPR, Avii).
In the Doctrine of Method and in the Critiqueof Practical Reason he identifies three postulates of God, freedom, and immorality, of which two are readily construed as articles of faith.
Notoriously Kant puts forward a very strong account of what we must hope in the Critique of Practical Reason. He there argues not only that we must hope that the moral intention can be inserted into the world to some extent, but that we must hope that the moral and natural orders can be fully coordinated in an optimal way in which happiness and virtue, our natural and our moral
ends, are eventually perfectly coordinated in each of us.
These demanding hopes are presented as requiring certain Postulates of Practical Reason. On Kant’s account a postulate is a theoretical proposition which is not as such [i.e., theoretically] demonstrable but which is an inseparable corollary of an a priori unconditionally valid practical law. (CPrR 122)
In the second Critique Kant argues for the demanding claim that we must aim not only to introduce the moral intention into the world but to work toward the summum bonum or complete coordination of natural and moral good, of happiness and virtue, in each free agent, so must hope for a correspondingly strong and complete degree of coordination between the natural and the
moral order, and so must postulate or hope for our own immortality and for the existence of God:
This infinite progress is possible, however, only under the presupposition of an infinitely enduring existence and personality of the same rational being; this is called the immortality of the soul. Thus the highest good is practically possible only on the supposition of the immortality of the soul. . . . (CPrR 122) Accordingly each of us may hope for a further uninterrupted continuance of this progress, however long his existence may last, even beyond this life. (CPrR 123)
Hence, Kant holds, we must also postulate the existence ... of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact coincidence of happiness with morality . . . the highest good is possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature which has a causality corresponding to the moral disposition. (CPrR 125)
If we aimed only for a lesser degree of happiness or of virtue, or for a lesser degree of their coordination, we might need to adopt only lesser postulates or hopes. However, the maximal aim would make little sense unless one also hoped for or assumed an eternity to achieve it and a deity to make it possible. The strong and specific claims about what we must hope that Kant defends in the Critique of Practical Reason are plausible if, but only if, we
find good reasons for the assumption that we must take it that a complete coordination of happiness and virtue in each of us is on the cards.
Many moves in this passage mirror those by which Kant argued in the second Critique to God and immortality: we are committed to moral aims whose feasibility we cannot prove theoretically; to make sense of this we need to postulate, assume, or hope for a 13 Cf.
human future that allows room for human progress (not in this case necessarily for progress to perfection); these hopes for the future of humankind cannot be renounced if we are committed to morality. Here and elsewhere Kant pictures human destiny in this worldly terms.
Only if any answer to the question “What may I hope?”
What are we to make of this apparent shift in Kant’s views?
Kant does not provide any basis for boasting that we know that there is a God and a future life, or even that we know that history will allow for progress. His account of what we must hope is, after all, only an account of the required core of hope that we must adopt to achieve consistency. It may be only this required core of hope that we are given grounds to think of as reasoned hope (a successor to docta spes).
This core of hope is cognitively simple and indeterminate. It is merely formal, or negative, unlike more determinate hopes for God and immortality or for specific modes of historical progress. It is nonderivative in the sense that it does not invoke or presuppose the authority of any particular metaphysical system or religious revelation, or of any church, or state, or other power. More over it is lawlike in the sense that these minimal hopes are hopes that everyone can have, indeed hopes that everyone who is committed to knowledge and action has reason to share.
In the second of these lectures I shall consider some of the accounts of permitted hope that can be found in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and ask whether Kant offers us reason to think that these more resonant hopes too lie within the limits of reason.
The distinctions between philosophical and biblical theology are a major theme also of Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, published a year later. There (as also in What Is Enlightenment?; also in Kant: Political Writings) he cites obedience to the state as the ultimate reason why biblical theologians may not appeal to reason: “the biblical theologian . . . draws his teaching not from reason but from the Bible; ... As soon as one of these faculties presumes to mix with its teachings something it treats as derived from reason, it offends against the authority of the government that issues orders through it” (CF 23).
Moreover, like the Critique of Practical Reason, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone takes up the question “What may I hope?” Here too Kant insists that hope forms the bridge that renders our dual commitment to knowledge and to moral action coherent. Our moral ambitions, indeed our moral intentions and our very plans of action, cannot be fully grounded in knowledge: we lack not only the relevant knowledge that the world is open to the possibility of moral or other intervention, but even the self-knowledge that would assure us that we are committed to moral action:
Man cannot attain naturally to assurance concerning such a [moral] revolution ... for the deeps of the heart (the subjective first grounds of his maxim) are inscrutable to him. Yet he must be able to hope through his own efforts to reach the road which leads hither. .. because he ought to become a good man.
(R 46)
Kant can be as scathing as any deist in his denunciation of popular superstition, which he castigates as religious illusion (R 156ff.), and of clericalism, which he denounces as fetishism “which borders very closely on paganism” (R 168):
yet he [Kant] does not denounce or renounce Scripture. Rather he regards it as important to show that Scripture can or may be read in a certain way.
So, most people probably took one look at that wall of text and gasp. Even all that is not sufficient to properly frame the arguments on the table right now, especially those who want extensive proofs.
The problem you are faced with in the secular/atheistic approach is that it limits or caps what morals are bonafide to the original postulates of 'pure' reason with the presumption the existence of God may only be proven through narrow ontological boundaries of pure reason alone, which is cherry picking to presume a predetermined result rather than to gain a complete understanding.
That said, your version without God, allows one to reason that genocide is good because it serves 'reason', despite that reason could be a ruthless dictator mudring anyone in opposition or a tyrannical gubblemint destroying lives with its pen through its judicial 'reasoning'.
Below is the link where some of the above quotes come from and it does support my reasoning on religion as I have stated many times in other threads pointing out and demonstrating that atheism and the governments secular humanism are not excluded from being a 'religion'.
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/o/oneill97.pdf
< Message edited by Real0ne -- 8/18/2015 1:26:13 PM >
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